MovieBeam, the one time high-profile Disney spin off was bought by Movie Gallery for $10 million dollars. MovieBeam re-launched last year with nearly $50 million in funding and the rumor was that they spent many millions more on the now defunct project. You have to ask yourself why any company would want to spend $10 million dollars to acquire the assets of a company that has no revenue and no customers. Apparently, Movie Gallery bought the technology so they can develop a movie delivery service of their own.

Say what now? Your going to replicate a service that has already been proven to be one that consumers don’t want? Am I the only one who thinks many of the companies out there today are not looking at mistakes made in the past? The history of the Internet can and does teach us many valuable lessons, if we are willing to learn from them. All that matters is what customers adopt and are willing to buy. The technology behind the service means nothing if it’s not adopted, as was evident from the MovieBeam service.

Love him or hate him, Mark Cuban’s blog always makes for good reading. He’s got a short little post from last month that explains the differences between TV and web video entitled "Snacks and Meals – The difference between Online Video and TV". It’s a great analogy and some of the readers comments on the post make for good reading as well. Head on over to Mark’s blog to read it.

Why is it that so many of us in the industry are still spending way too much of our time explaining to people the differences between online video and TV? Doesn’t everyone get it by now? It is not a hard concept to grasp yet it seems like years later we’re still having to point out the differences.

At the Streaming Media West show last year, I did a presentation entitled "Flash Versus Windows Media: How to Choose the Right Format". One of the purposes of my presentation was to compare the two formats on a factual basis. Not which format has better codecs or compression but rather highlighting what each format did or did not support, like live streaming, DRM and other platform functionality.

One of the strong points about the Windows Media format is that it is the dominant format for webcasting. When it comes to live broadcasting, Windows Media is the format that is used hands-down. But this year, Adobe seems to be making progress in giving Windows Media a run for it’s money. More and more I am hearing from customers who want to try out Flash for live broadcasting and content delivery networks are actively working to build out their networks to support live Flash. Add that to the recent release by Adobe of their live Flash encoding tool, and the Adobe Flash format is quickly starting to pique webcasters interest. Yes, the quality of live Flash at high bitrates is still not as good as Windows Media and the Adobe live Flash Media Encoder is missing some features, but it’s expected Adobe will work quickly on fixing those issues.

It’s an exciting time in the industry as both Adobe and Microsoft are really stepping up to the plate this year with new announcements and product offerings for their video platforms. Later in the year, it’s going to shape up to be a real platform battle and round two is just getting underway.

For a long time now, the term streaming media has been thought of as something sold by vendors. For the first few years of any new technology, the terminology is bound to get confusing and used in the incorrect manner. But 13 years since streaming media technology was first used on the Internet, I think it’s time we describe the technology and services correctly.

Streaming media is not a service. You don’t sell streaming media. It’s a technology, plain and simple. I see a lot of websites by industry vendors that list streaming media as one of their services. What they should be saying is they sell content delivery. If that content is delivered via streaming, downloading, progressive downloading, webcasting etc…who cares? I know that many use the term this way because that’s what the market bears, it’s the way customers refer to it and it’s what everyone has gotten use to. I’m guilty of the same, as that’s how I sold the service back when I was at Globix. But I think 13 years later, we are at the point where as an industry we should be working together to describe and sell the services correctly.

I am looking to hire someone for a few months to help me with the planning of the Streaming Media Europe show taking place October 4-5th in London. Primarily, I am looking for someone to work with me on the following:

• conference agenda. talk to people in the UK about what topics they want to see at the show, help write session descriptions and help organize the show format
• speaker placement. help me go through all the submissions I get, help me reach out to and invite other speakers, and create a list of speakers we want to target to get to the show
• be on hand at local networking events to represent the Europe show and talk to people, collect cards, network etc…. we do a few of these leading up to the show. the next one is March 6th that we are doing with Kendra
• at the show, help me get speakers into the rooms, make sure all runs smoothly etc..

We have a good local UK pr, marketing and sales team already in place so there is no help needed on sales, marketing and all the really hard work. Of course, we always open to ideas on how you may want to help there but the biggest help I need is really the speakers and the shows agenda.

There would be some months where there would be work, and other months were there would not be any. The busy months would be in April and May when we would have to plan the advance program and then September the month before the show and of course the 3 days of the show in October. In June, July and August there would not be much to do aside from some e-mails.

If you are interested, please contact me ASAP as I will be making a decision this week. You MUST be based in or around London and your current job must not be a conflict of interest.

In the past day or so, USAToday.com relaunched its website with a new layout, new editorial features and new content. But the one piece of content they didn’t feature is video. How can this be? Am I the only one who now can’t find video anywhere on their website? With all that is going on with news organizations saying how much print is dead an how their online properties are crucial to their survival, I find it hard to believe that someone as large as USA Today is not using video to tell their stories. Can anyone show me where on their website you can get video? I have to believe that I am either missing something and don’t see a link somewhere or they have completely buried the video somewhere else on the site.

The Wall Street Journal had a good article last week reviewing the current MobiTV service on Sprint Nextel and AT&T’s Cingular networks. The outcome of the review is that MobiTV’s service is still the only one that provides "live" streaming of TV with no requirement of downloading the content to the device like the Verizon’s V Cast system requires.

All in all the MobiTV service got a pretty good review. The biggest downside to the experience for the reviewer was that her eyes got tired after 30 minutes due to the small screen not being the ideal device to watch long form content. Non surprise there, short form content is the only type that has a shot at making any traction on mobile devices. While the cost of the service was also outlined, that’s another one of the many factors that I believe keeps it from being adopted here in the States.

One thing I would of liked to have seen in the article is a breakdown on MobiTV’s subscriber numbers broken out by country or region. How many of the 2 million current subscribers are based in the U.S.? They don’t seem to say anywhere on their website or in their press releases. My guess is that less than 10% of their business is coming from the U.S. today.